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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

The New York Times Goes Digital: Technologizing an Originally Paper-Based Company

In 2006, The New York Times had 20 engineers, all located in a separate building off-site. Engineering and journalism were organized as completely separate entities, even ad-sales departments were separate. How do you change a culture like this into a culture where technology drives and supports journalism? This was the challenge Marc Frons had when he joined the New York Times as technology officer in 2006. During QCon New York 2013, Frons -- now CIO at The New York Times -- with his colleague Rajiv Pant -- their CTO -- gave a keynote about this challenge.

A lot changed at The New York Times since then: departments have been merged and journalists and engineers mingle. Events are organized to encourage technological development, including:

Hack days, during which engineers and journalist together hack on new technology projects, preferably related to The New York Times, but not necessarily.

100% days, the answer to Google's 20% time, where engineers can spend a full day per month on whatever exciting technology project they come up with.

The New York Times has been hiring aggressively and managed to attract great talent, including people like Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js. Yet, the company faces the same challenges as many other companies building software: build or buy? What software do you build in-house, and what software do you buy from other vendors? The company has experimented in many ways, ranging from building software using their own programming language, to buying complete off-the shelf system and putting them in production. Today, the company uses custom-built content-management system and data analysis tools, but runs much of its infrastructure on Amazon EC2, and does continuous integration with Hudson.

Another such recurring theme in modern web development is the web versus native debate on mobile. The New York Times decided not to bet on one horse, they are trying to deliver a good experience on all (mobile) platforms, both web and native.

The New York Times also exposes much of its content via APIs, on its developer network, encouraging third parties to build applications using this data.

The New York Times went through a cultural shift that many publications are going through right now: the transition from paper to online, from low-tech to high-tech. Today's QCon keynote gave a good overview of the challenges these companies are facing today, and how, in many ways, they overlap with most other hi-tech companies.